Environmental ethics

• Some objections to the deep ecology view is:

  1. There are links between deep ecology and groups like Earth first! and the earth Liberation Front that are labeled as eco-terrorists
  2. Some have argued against biocentrism and the idea that nature has objective or autonomous intrinsic value
  3. It challenges technological progress, because of its skepticism towards technology and industrial progress it has been critiqued for potentially hindering beneficial advancements
• Dawkins rejected Gaia because it implied that individual organisms work together for the good of the biosphere, Organisms do not work to look after the whole planet and it seems to be at odds with evolution
• The Paris agreement is a legally binding international treaty on climate change and it was adopted by 196 parties at the UN climate change conference in Paris on 12 December 2016
• some ethicists have argued that animals are not members of the moral community and that we have no moral obligation towards them
• Carl Cohan argues that animals have no rights as rights only exist between people who can make moral claims on each other
• Immanuel Kant held that the mistreatment of animals is wrong because it coarseness the human spirit and that we do have indirect duties regarding animals, duties that are not towards them, but in regard to them insofar our treatment of them can effect our duties to persons
• Tom Regan argued that we should n to only avoid the mistreatment of animals but also to improve their quality of life because persons share with certain non-persons the ability to be an experiencing subject of a life and have an individual welfare that matters to them regardless of what other think
• Singer argues that the principle of equality should also operate with animals, this does not mean that we think animals are equal to humans but rather our treatment of all humans and non-humans must be equal in accordance with Bentham's principle of utility
• Bentham's principle states that 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation'
• Peter Singer believes that if we accept the principle of equality then we cannot eat meat or wear leather shoes because these things involve causing pain to sentient beings without any benefit to ourselves
• Aristotle's virtue ethics seems to suffer a similar flaw to Kant's. Animals have no share in Eudaimonia (Human flourshins) and he argues because they are incapable of either practical or theoretical reason
• Environmental ethics refer to the moral and/or religious duties human being have towards the environment
• the secular approach to shallow ecology is anthropocentric: the natural world has no intrinsic value but must be conserved to give human beings a sustainable future
• eco-hotlist based on Lovelocks's Gaia hypothesis argues that the earth is a holistic biosphere in which every entity is interdependent and in which the human race is of no particular significance in the long run